Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Midnight Alley-Miles Corwin

Midnight Alley

Miles Corwin

Oceanview, Apr 16 2012, $25.95

ISBN 9781608090389

LAPD Felony Special Squad Detective Ash Levine looks forward to the weekend getaway in Santa Barbara with his estranged wife Robin. He hopes this will be a new beginning for them after a horrific two-year separation.

However, he is in Rincon twelve miles from his destination when his boss Lieutenant Duffy calls pleading with him to come home to work a highly visible double homicide case in Venice as most of the squad are out of state on vacations. One of the victims is Raymond Pinkney, the son of a LAPD bashing city councilman Isaac Pinkney. Robin surprises him when she tells him to take notes in detail to avoid the civil case Pinkney will file and to call her when he is finished. As he investigates leads that take the former Israel Defense Forces paratrooper into the dangerous milieu of the Russian Mafia, someone hires former convict Mullin to assassinate a cop.

The second Ash Levine police procedural (see Kind of Blue) is an action-packed thriller that soars from the moment Duffy calls the noir hero and never eases off the accelerator until the final confrontation. Although convoluted with ties to the Russian Mafia and Baghdad, Robin sums up the exhilarating tale with her dubbing Ash (for his over the top of Mount Lukens escapades) “Rambowitz”.